In a judgment filed Saturday, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan sided with Universal Music Group’s Capitol Records, which had sued ReDigi for copyright violation.

Sullivan’s argument, in a nutshell: Unless the copyright owner gives you explicit permission to do so, you can’t resell a digital media file.

That doesn’t make sense to me.

Jay

It makes perfect sense: because you can make infinite copies of a digital media file, there’s no way of knowing which file is the true original file that you actually bought. Therefore, without the restriction, you could essentially buy one copy and then resell it to an infinite number of buyers. Allowing that is what doesn’t make sense.

accidentaldesign

Those are my thoughts, too. Logical enough. But that isn’t the argument that won.

The “unless the copyright owner gives you explicit permission to do so” argument is strange to me. Couldn’t any copyright owner use this argument to forbid the resale of any physical content, too?

Except the ruling was not about physical media – that would be a separate thing entirely. It’s literally a different ballgame since physical items are looked at differently. A physical CD is considered an original that you can physically transfer without making a copy. Digital files are seen as very different beasts due to their makeup and – most importantly – their distribution.

We also have more established case law regarding first sale doctrine and physical items.

lucascott

They tried. They failed with physical items so long as the original item is what was being sold, since no copy was being made.